Twenty Favorite Collections of Flash Fiction (An International Selection)

(alphabetically by author, with ten from America and ten from elsewhere)

 

American

  • Hoopty Time Machines: Fairy Tales for Grown Ups by Christopher DeWan

  • Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

  • You on Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories by Jennifer A. Howard

  • Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon

  • The Afflictions by Vikram Paralkar

  • And Yet They Were Happy by Helen Phillips

  • Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

  • Cradle Book: Stories & Fables by Craig Morgan Teicher

  • Ghosts of You by Cathy Ulrich

  • Minor Robberies by Deb Olin Unferth

Non-American

  • Blue Has No South by Alex Epstein (Israel)

  • Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan)

  • Atlas Inutilis by Hervé Le Tellier (France)

  • Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels by Giorgio Manganelli (Italy)

  • Complete Works and Other Stories by Augusto Monterroso (Guatemala)

  • The Toy Catalogue by Sandra Petrignani (Italy)

  • Anthropology by Dan Rhodes (England)

  • Microfictions by Ana Maria Shua (Argentina)

  • Grow a Pair: 9½ Fairy Tales About Sex by Joanna Walsh (England)

  • The Temple of Iconoclasts by J. Rodolfo Wilcock (Argentina/Italy)

(I want to add one album to this list: Uncommon Deities, a 2012 release on the Samadhisound label, on which, with the musical accompaniment of Jan Bang, Erik Honoré, Arve Henriksen, and Sidsel Endresen, David Sylvian recites a series of what I would consider flash pieces, mostly written by the Norwegian writer Paal Helge-Haugen, about the hidden and forgotten gods of the universe. You can listen to it here.)

— September 12, 2020


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